Simple: They sold exclusive rights in quite a few countries to TV networks before they expanded there.

Not disagreeing, but it still seems odd as the Netflix Original Content is the big carrot to get people hooked into their ecosystem.

"Netflix Original Content" doesn't really mean anything anyway. Better Call Saul is "Netflix Original Content" in every country but the United States, even though they had nothing to do with getting it made. They just bought the non-US rights: http://promo.xfm.co.uk/bettercallsaul/images/970x250_backup_...

They do the same thing here in the US or I guess Netflix is creating a large number of foreign movies and TV shows.

Not in Australia. Better Call Saul is on a Netflix competitor called Stan.

I can only assume they didn't plan to expand this quickly and would have lost a lot of money by adding "in case we are in this market by then" clauses to the contracts. But yes, it certainly leaves a strange impression.

Just because something is "Netflix Original Content" in one country doesn't mean it's "Netflix Original Content" in another. For example "The 100" is "Netflix Original Content" in Canada but in the US it's not -- it's distributed by some TV network.

> How on earth does Netflix not have the rights to show their own show in Switzerland?

One often-overlooked point is soundtracks. This is why there's no official Cold Case DVD/BD set - it would be prohibitively expensive to license all the music for distribution outside of TV.

Same thing with "Wonder Years" it's all about licensing... hell "Daria" had to replace significant portions of the music (thankfully they had the original separate tracks to work from).

Another case in point: House MD doesn't have Massive Attack's "Teardrop" as the intro theme anywhere outside the US.

Netflix doesn't "own" House of Cards.

Media Rights Capital "owns" House of Cards, Netflix distributes the show. Even then MRC's rights are probably limited because they bought the rights to the concept from the BBC who originally did House of Cards as a mini-series.

IIRC Netflix purchased the streaming rights for House of Cards from a studio, but the studio sold rights to others for medias/locations Netflix wasn't in at the time. E.g. you can buy House of Cards on disc from Sony, or on various on-demand services. Or possibly for streaming, Netflix had those rights but sublicensed them before expanding (oops, if that's the case).

Netflix doesn't even have an exclusive liscense for the USA. IIRC House of Cards S1 is on comcast xfinity streaming.

Because Netflix (or other companies) just simply do not have the resources to manage the duty of distributing content all over the world. Hence, there exists regional distributors. Allocating duties to those regional distributors means that you'll need to sign a contract that gives those distributors special rights.